The Left Hand of Darkness
Hugo and Nebula winner, the founding masterpiece of feminist SF, and a permanent fixture at the top of all-time lists.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is The Dispossessed about?
Physicist Shevek leaves Anarres — the anarchist moon settled by exiles a hundred and seventy years before — for the lush capitalist mother-world Urras, carrying a theory of time that will make ansible-instant communication possible, and the heresy that even an anarchy can calcify into conformism. Le Guin alternates the two worlds chapter by chapter, structuring the book like Shevek's physics, and subtitles it 'an ambiguous utopia' with scrupulous honesty: Anarres is dusty, hungry, magnificent and flawed, and the novel weighs it against abundance-with-masters without cheating either side.
Why it matters
Hugo, Nebula and Locus winner; the standard against which all political SF is measured, taught in politics departments as readily as literature ones.
Where does it sit in the series?
Le Guin's loose future history of worlds seeded by ancient Hain, visited one by one by envoys of the Ekumen — anthropological SF's defining sequence.
In the Guide from The Hainish Cycle:
- The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
- The Dispossessed (1974)
Read next
Cyteen
Hugo winner (1989) and a regular pick for the best SF novel about cloning ever written; its psychogenesis arguments anticipate decades of behavioural-genetics debate.
Downward to the Earth
Widely rated among the finest SF novels about colonialism; its sacramental aliens and penitent imperialist predate (and arguably outclass) several famous successors, Avatar included.